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Archigram

Minimaforms was invited by Archigram’s David Greene to rethink and evolve his seminal projects the Living Pod and High-Rise Tower as part of his exhibition ‘Imperfect Works’. Our project took the form of a conversation, one that would be enabled through the construction of series of models that would speculate on alternative forms of living.

These new models would be constructed as thought experiments highlighting time-based proto-systems that could demonstrate animalistic and collective orders of organisation. These systems were developed as a response to transform the discrete ‘plug-in’ autonomy of the high-rise pods and their deterministic mega-structural (structure and circulation) systems of organisation. Our strategy looked towards the development of generative computational processes that privileged evolutionary and self structuring forms of interaction. Units were designed as behavioural agents that would take on the identity of their inhabitants. Each agent understood as an autopoietic machine.

The project articulates three evolutionary stages in this conceptual metamorphosis.

Stage 1: Pods will evolve self-structured shells articulated through a taxonomy of skeletal spicules. These spicules will allow for complex interlinking with a variable structuring of unit-to-unit relations. From discrete self-contained units the project will evolve as interactive agents that are co-dependent.

Stage 2: Pods will evolve tails. These tails are computational paths that allow access to each pod. The tails are paths that trace their history over time, allowing high-population agent interactions to be defined. As the computational agents find dynamic stability, scanning radii optimise paths in range and bundle neighbouring tails, constructing internal and external access networks.